All of those questions have been posed to me by men throughout my Information Technology (IT) career. For the sake of efficiency, let’s just say they all were asked by “Josh,” a composite 20-something co-worker.

Josh asked the first 4 (and similar) questions in the beginning weeks of my employment. Some of his ridiculous attitude was rooted in sexism. I’ll write about that another day. Today let’s examine what else “diversity” can mean in the IT workplace.

Get over it

The 5th question about my college major came months later. The surprise over my lack of Computer Science (CS) degree would always surface after I’d mastered and surpassed a tech skill. It was as if there was law against Psych majors grokking the command line.

//not everyone needs a CS degree to work in IT

//your job isn’t that hard

I get it. For Josh and fellow server room denizens, my psych-major presence presented them with a few harsh “realities.” According to Josh:

He paid and worked his ass off for a CS degree, and he could’ve “cruised” through a psych major.

She (Christine) doesn’t code as much as he does but she gets paid the same.

He will have to teach her everything!

Aside from the dis on Psych, this is where Josh’s logic breaks. Not only could his sys admin job be done by a less-than-l33t person, it could be mastered by one in a matter of months. This rocked Josh’s world so soundly that Josh had to start questioning his career expectations and path. The geek heaven Josh thought he was entering after college wasn’t the elite team of crack coders he expected. He wasn’t ruling a server room and running the whole business. Instead, he was on the same corporate ladder as everyone else (and at the bottom of it). Worse than this, he had to admit he lacked the business and communication skills needed to climb that ladder. All the coding languages, certifications, and CS skills Josh acquired weren’t going to be enough to float him to the top.

Cool Cat vs. Grumpy Cat

Some Joshes took the hit of my existence in stride. Instead of brushing me off, they gave me keys to the kingdom one by one. When I didn’t break the Internet, they gave me more. Eventually I held all of the same access and I used it well. In fact, they’d send me off to do things like server maintenance and infrastructure duplications (usually for South America because I spoke Spanish) while they worked on some code. Other Joshes hemmed and hawed. They usually had poor coding skills that didn’t earn extra time from our managers. They would grow grumpier and grumpier while I steadily collected more skills and certs.

Somewhere along the way, these grumpy tech guys picked up an “I’m Special and You’re Not” brain tattoo. They held themselves back because they couldn’t accept that their job – or the whole world of enterprise IT – wasn’t reserved for the highly elite. Their job, once learned, was pretty repetitive and unchallenging. But the hardest part by far was accepting that they themselves weren’t highly elite, and that drove their prejudice and exclusionary behavior to dangerous levels.

The next time you send some techies off for a sensitivity seminar, make sure the course covers not only diversity in culture but also diversity in education and experience. As more systems are automated and more IT businesses sprout up, the non-CS worker will become the norm. Welcome them, and it’s ice cream for everybody.

That is somewhat true to certain degree, when I was applying some IT tech will ask me certain questions that they think they are the only one knows the answer, and it’s foolish to be that way.. When I moved on to a corporate world, I didn’t see those kind of behavior. Meaning, only those who are in the low-level degree IT does this, or they are insecure about their job.

–Computer scientists in the early 80’s didn’t need to have biz skills. I worked w/ plenty who didn’t — and, they either changed w/ the times or saw their careers stagnate.

–What you detailed above isn’t a computer scientist problem. It’s a clueless person problem. Some doctors assume that they know more about everything medical than their patients do, too. I knew more about earwax removal formulations than my dr did — my Dad used to sell them.

–Setting requirements for a job (e.g. comp sci degree) is just a way to screen out people who are less likely to have a certain set of skills. Sometimes the people setting the requirement are employing faulty reasoning skills (e.g. the job requires technology knowledge or ability and not hardcore comp sci education). And, sure — sometimes the people setting the requirement are sexist or protectionist (I probably mist, er, missed other -ists, too).

–During my years as a person who hired programmers, one of my best finds was a psych major w/ a comp sci minor. My headhunter almost didn’t send me her resume, assuming that I was looking for a comp sci major. She wasn’t the best programmer I ever hired (she was good, just not great) — but, she was certainly the best user interface design person I ever hired — and the only person I ever hired who enjoyed user interface design. Guess who became the liaison between my software development department and our internal and external clients?

–But, back to Josh: he’s just dumb. If someone is doing the job, then obviously their education was sufficient even if they dropped out of school in 6th grade. Any decent comp sci should know that!